Now that it looks like my gaming group’s long-proposed Knights of the Old Republic campaign may actually be coming to fruition, I’ve been stocking up on source books. The first of these is Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy, which I hoped would provide me with a toolbox of non-player characters, monsters and other challenges … Read more
I write too much. This is not a new or sudden revelation. I’ve known since college that I could fill a notebook with ideas when preparing for a night’s game of Dungeons & Dragons. I might write 12,000 words to describe a three-story arc adventure, and use 1/4 of what I wrote. That’s grossly inefficient, … Read more
It’s appropriate that the Pathfinder RPG Beta would be released while my gaming group’s taking a two-week break from our D&D 4th Edition playtest. During the hiatus we’re tying up some loose ends in our D&D 3.5 Dark City campaign, which is a role-playing intensive, urban campaign set in the World of Greyhawk. Dark City’s … Read more
High-level play within D&D 3rd Edition is hard. Whether you’re playing 3.0 or 3.5, the end result is the same: thousands of feats, hundreds of prestige classes and gods-only-know how many spells give rise to complicated game mechanics that slow play to a crawl. Iterative attacks, in which high-level martial classes like the fighter or … Read more
This week’s game sees us returning to our Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition roots after weeks of beating up 4th Edition in our Planetorn playtest campaign. The playtest’s not over, just on hiatus because of real-world player obligations, and this pause is giving us a chance to go back and tie up some loose ends … Read more
After a brief respite in Sigil, where they were attacked by a cunning band of phase gnomes, last Friday’s D&D 4E playtest campaign saw my gaming group venture back out into the wilds of the planescape. This time they traveled to the Dire Forest of Yalzerth, an alternative material plane in the midst of … Read more
When Wizards of the Coast decided to kill the ill-fated (and ill-named) Gleemax project before it got out of alpha, a bunch of role-playing game bloggers stood up and said … who needs Gleemax? You want a gamer community … well we’ve got your community right here! Or words to that effect.
They formed the RPG Bloggers Network, which is aggregating the RPG-centric posts from more than 30 gaming blogs including Critical Hits, Musing of a Chatty DM and Uncle Bear.
And yeah, Nuketown is there too.
One of the things I like best about the site is how it aggregates content — it’s pulls in stories into its home page and incorporates a rating mechanic as it does so. I haven’t found a page that aggregates those ratings into a big list, but I imagine that’s coming.
Wizards of the Coast is killing Gleemax. WotC is refocusing their efforts after the fumbled launch of the D&D Insider initiative (ok, I say “fumbled” you say “catastrophic failure…”), which failed to include the over-promised and much coveted online gaming table and character generators for D&D 4th Edition and the painful Magic Online v3 upgrade … Read more
We’re about halfway through our Planetorn play-test campaign, with the fourth session happening today, and perhaps another three or four to go before it runs its course. This milestone has me reflecting on where the campaign’s been, where it’s going, and what I hope to accomplish before it’s all over. Today’s adventure finds our heroes … Read more
D&D 4th Edition — particularly the Player’s Handbook — taken a lot of criticism for being 99% crunch, and 1% fluff. It’s also taken hits for the gutting of many of the role-playing aspects from earlier editions, including skills like craft, profession, and perform. All of this is true, but 4E’s saving grace is the … Read more